By Bob Monahan, Globe Staff, 02/13/1979

They had plunked the old silver trophy against a wall and forgotten it amid the blur of handshakes, cameras, discarded equipment and shower steam. And now it was past midnight, and the victor's locker room was almost empty, and the captain and the MVP were buttoning coats and heading for the door.

"Ah, who's taking this?," Jack O'Callahan wondered. "Hey, Daryl. Who's taking the "Pot?"

Daryl MacLeod, who had won the thing with an acrobatic goal eight minutes
from the end, seemed puzzled. "Who's taking what? Oh ... yeah."

Oh, yeah. The Beanpot. Stuff it in a bag and give it to a manager, lock the door, and head for The Dugout and a cold beer. Boston University 4, Boston
College 3, and how much, really, had changed?

It was simply another February date with the people from The Heights, another capacity house (14,456) on Causeway street, and another one-goal victory, BU's 14th in a row, and 22d in 23 games.

It ended the way BU-BC games have ended for three years, with O'Callahan holding a trophy over his head with a great toothless grin, and the Eagles leaning glumly along their dasher, elbows cradled on sticks.

Eleven times. Eleven games since BC won the 1976 Beanpot, and the most the Eagles have managed against BU is one 6-6 overtime tie. Oh-ten-and-one. Three years of reading pregame stories about BU's dominance, then watching BU go out and, somehow, some way, reaffirm it.

"Maybe they'll be ready for us next time," O'Callahan would say last night after the Terriers had danced, again, on the edge of the precipice and walked away whistling. "They probably weren't ready for us this time."

For BC, it was merely another sad midnight movie, the closing scene the same. This time, they had spotted BU leads of 2-0 (41 seconds into the second period) and 3-1 (37 seconds into the third), come back to tie it on dramatic goals by Joe Mullen and Mike Ewanouski within two minutes, and taken it all down to the final eight minutes.

Once again, BU had filched the game away with a goal nobody seemed to see until the red light went on. Just the newly christened Commonwealth Connection - three Massachusetts kids named Billy Cotter (Charlestown), Todd Johnson (Wayland) and MacLeod (Melrose - that ruined Harvard in minutes last week and had opened the scoring last night.

This time MacLeod was behind the BC cage and, when goalie Paul Skidmore knocked aside a Cotter shot, "I spun around for the rebound and put it in."

Just like that. Minutes later, O'Callahan was leading a celebratory "conga line" around the Garden ice, holding BU's seventh Beanpot in 10 years. And the Eagles were skating towards the dressing room, mumbling to themselves.

The Eagles had seen the quotes all week, exuberant Terriers talking about how the game would be another chapter in the soap opera of life, a game of Rollerball, with BU on their Harleys and BC on their Kawasakis. They had read a story in which BU goalie Jim Craig said how nice it would be to shake the hands of a losing BC squad one more time, how it was Skidmore's own fault that he had missed the first semester.

The Eagles had pinned a few notes to their McHugh Forum wall and gritted their teeth. "We hadn't dished out any garbage," Skidmore would say. "The only things we said were in response to what they'd said about us. O'Callahan, and especially Craig. There was no need for that. Craig went a little overboard, I thought."

The Terriers had laughed about all that. Craig received a few obscene phone calls yesterday (one caller threatened: "Last week it was firecrackers. This week it'll be bottles") and shrugged them off. "All the media stuff doesn't mean anything," O'Callahan would say. "It's still us against them. Fifteen thousand people in here. Half of them love us. And half of them hate us."

For nearly two periods, though, the Garden belonged to the Terriers, who ran through their classic repertoire, jetting and swarming and delighting the purists. There was an absolutely perfect power-play goal, all five players touching the puck, left point to right point to Mark Fidler in the left faceoff circle, to Dave Silk in the right corner to John Bethel for the goalmouth finish. Twenty-seven seconds elapsed time.

And there were four straight minutes of textbook penalty-killing, the first two with BU two-men down as forward Marc Hetnik iced the puck three times.

It took a lovely goal by Mullen, swerving, skidding, and sweeping the puck past Craig, to drag BC back into it late in the second period, and another (on a redirection of a George Amidon blast) to keep them in it after Tony Meagher had made it 3-1.

"We knew Mullen was going to get two," O'Callahan would say. "He does it every time. I don't know how the hell he keeps sneaking away on us."

Yet, ultimately, it was BU that snuck away, that regained control and bided its time and struck quickly with a fourth line and ended it, sending half of 15,000 people out into the cold muttering about a Feb. 27 rematch on The Heights.

"Maybe our day will come," sighed BC coach Lenny Ceglarski. "At least one day. Maybe we'll get even with 'em. Or one-third even. Or a quarter even."